Patterns in the complementary determining regions of immunoglobulins (CDRs).

An analysis of the frequency of use of amino acids on the CDR-1 and CDR-2 of 1500 immunoglobulins showed that the frequencies of amino acids in different positions could be fitted by two types of distribution. For some positions the frequencies were fitted by an inverse power law and for other positions by an exponential distribution. In order to see whether the more frequently used amino acids for specific positions had physicochemical properties or attributes in common, they were clustered using an algorithm normally applied to artificial intelligence problems. It was found that the amino acids in those positions fitted by the inverse power law have similar hydrophobicity and volume, which are commonly attributes of amino acids in structural positions. Thus, if these positions are critical to maintaining the structural features of the CDR domains, the rest of the positions should be either properly involved in the recognition process or irrelevant. The frequencies of amino acids in these recognition positions were fitted by the exponential law, and it was found by the clustering analysis that these amino acids share properties of a more general type, such as capability of forming hydrogen bonds, polarity, etc. This suggests that at least part of the recognition mechanism requires general properties rather than specific amino acids. Amino acids sharing the required attributes for each one of these positions are then used with random frequency.

A skewed distribution of amino acids at recognition sites of the hypervariable region of immunoglobulins.

Antibody binding site are formed by six hypervariable regions or complementarity determining regions (CDRs). The CDRs, three from the heavy chain and three from the light chain, are known as hypervariable segments and provide a surface complementary to that of the epitope. In recent work it was found that the amino acids in these positions fulfill different functions: Some play a structural role and others are involved in the specificity-determining function. It is reported here that the frequency of amino acids at hypervariable sites is skewed. By means of an informational algorithm, key physicochemical attributes of the dominant residues were identified for some of those sites. The results for about 1,500 antibodies suggest that approximately 35% of sites involved in the recognition process require only general properties such as composition, volume, and bulk or hydrogen bonding which are satisfied by a small set of amino acids instead of any one particular complementary amino acid.